March 27, 2014

Julie Lynn Hayes: Yes, He's My Ex

Please welcome my good friend Julie Lynn Hayes back to the blog. Julie brought us an excerpt of her quirky upcoming release from Dreamspinner Press, Yes, He's My Ex.

~~~~~~~~~~

They don’t make comedies like they
used to.

Nowadays, you don’t see comedians
like the Marx Brothers, or WC Fields, or the Keystone Cops. Groucho
Marx could elicit belly laughs just by the way he rolled his eyes or
waggled his thick painted-on eyebrows. The Keystone Cop films were
famous for their chase scenes—just good old-fashioned fun—while
Harold Lloyd swung perilously off the end of a clock hand.

As a kid, I watched the Marx Brothers
and WC Fields, Joe E Brown and Mae West. One of my favorite scenes in
the Marx Brothers many hilarious films comes from A Night at the
Opera. The boys are in their stateroom on the ocean liner, and it’s
one of the most famous comedy sequences ever in which any number of
people end up inside this tiny stateroom, and you sit in the audience
wondering who else can possibly fit.

There were also romantic comedies too,
films like Jimmy Cagney in Boy Meets Girl, in which he presents the
formula for every love story ever told: boy meets girl, boy loses
girl, boy gets girl. Of course, it’s fun to turn that trope around
and change it to: boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy. Because
two men in love? You can never go wrong, right?

I loved Doris Day as I was growing up,
and she made some very funny romantic comedies. In one, she was
dragged out of bed by an irate Rock Hudson and carried through the
streets in her pajames to the scene of the crime—the bachelor pad
she had so viciously “decorated” for him, thinking he was nothing
more than a playboy on the

make. In another film, The Glass Bottom
Boat, Doris got a job with the Space Agency and met a handsome
astrophysicist, played by Rod Taylor, who took a liking to her, but
the suspicious people at NASA thought Doris was a Russian spy, and
things just went crazy from there... Of course, all’s well that
ends well. You can’t very well have a romantic comedy that ends
badly, that makes it a tragedy, doesn’t it?

That’s what I’ve tried to do with
Yes, He’s My Ex. It started out as a flash fiction on my blog, a
simple story about an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t seem to get it
through his thick head that they were over. But then things began to
happen. A cry for help leads Tim into a race to save Sonny. Goofy
gangster, a dumb ex-boyfriend, and the FBI... what else can happen to
Sonny and Tim? Read Yes He’s My Ex and find out!

Sometimes Sonny Scrignoli forgets he’s
Tim Mansfield’s ex. He waltzes in and out of Tim’s apartment like
he still lives there, driving Tim crazy. Is it really so hard to
remember they’ve broken up? Then again, maybe Tim should quit
having sex with him.

When Sonny disappears for two
weeks, Tim can’t help but be concerned. A strange phone call and a
mysterious cry for help leads Tim on a desperate search for his
ex.

Sonny’s in big trouble, and it’s Tim to the rescue!
He’s the only one who can save his ex from a fate worse than death.
Bumbling gangsters, a thick-headed former boyfriend, and secretive
FBI agents lead Tim and Sonny on a merry chase full of laughs and
quirks.

Excerpt:

Sonny’s
real name is Mario, but he’s been called Sonny since he was a small
bambino, as his mother puts it, so Sonny it is. Sonny stands almost
six foot tall in his bare feet, which are surprisingly small for a
man, almost dainty. He has chocolate brown hair that grows thick but
not long, and generally looks tousled; blue eyes so dark that
sometimes they look purple in the proper light, framed behind silver
wire spectacles; a generous nose and wide sweet lips which have been
known to give the most amazing head this side of anywhere. Put that
with the body of an Adonis, and you have Sonny.

I
had
Sonny, but not anymore. He seems not to realize that, though. At
least not most of the time. Hence the part where I see him more often
than should be considered normal for someone who’s my ex. Which is
where I began.

Sometimes
I think he forgets that he has indeed attained that past participle
ex-boyfriend status. Granted, it’s only been six months. His mother
tells me he just needs time to adjust, please don’t be too hard on
her boy. Yes, I still see her too. On a rather regular basis, in
fact. Hard not to, when she’s my mother’s best friend. Lucky me.
Lia’s a nice lady, I love her to death. But she has this
deep-seated belief that Sonny and I are going to get back together
again, a belief he seems to share. Along with my mother. And most of
our friends.

No
one seems to listen to me when I say snowballs rolling along the
floor of Hell have a better chance of survival than our relationship.
Least of all Sonny. I guess that’s why he keeps coming over here,
because in some strange deranged naïve corner of his mind, there’s
still an us, and he isn’t an ex. So he wanders over whenever he
wants. Sometimes he calls, sometimes he doesn’t. Today he called.

Sometimes
I just get tired of telling him no. Some days I don’t even get that
far. Today, I didn’t want to waste my breath, so I just said,
“Fine. As long as you promise to behave.”

By
behave, I mean quit assuming we’re going to have sex. Even if
sometimes we do. I know, I know, he’s my ex, right?

Sometimes
I just don’t know where to draw that fine line, I think. No wonder
the boy’s confused.

Meet the author:

Julie Lynn Hayes was
reading at the age of two and writing by the age of nine and always
wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Two marriages, five children,
and more than forty years later, that is still her dream. She blames
her younger daughters for introducing her to yaoi and the world of
M/M love, a world which has captured her imagination and her heart
and fueled her writing in ways she'd never dreamed of before. She
especially loves stories of two men finding true love and happiness
in one another's arms and is a great believer in the happily ever
after. She lives in St. Louis with her daughter Sarah and two cats,
loves books and movies, and hopes to be a world traveler some day.
She enjoys crafts, such as crocheting and cross stitch, knitting and
needlepoint and loves to cook. While working a temporary day job, she
continues to write her books and stories and reviews, which she posts
in various places on the internet. Her family thinks she is a bit
off, but she doesn't mind. Marching to the beat of one's own drummer
is a good thing, after all. Her published works can be found at
Dreamspinner Press, Amber Quill Press, MuseitUp Publishing, Torquere
Press, and eXtasy Books, and coming soon to Wayward Ink Publishing
and Prizm Publishing. She has also begun to self-publish and is an
editor at MuseitUp.